KNOWLEDGE AS A GOOD: SCIENCE, EDUCATION, AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

Prefatory remarks Knowledge, above all in its theoretical forms, was once considered the essence of Man--the rational being--and, therefore, the highest form of human activity. Hence the famous opening sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics: All men strive by nature towards And thus in his ethics he qualifies theory as the highest form of praxis, although one should bear in mind that this is an ideal--it is neither a fact, nor is it actually attainable. Knowledge is here identified with a form of life. And in consequence, knowledge has always been identified with a subject--an exceptional scientist or an admired teacher. But this conception is, if we leave some particular cases aside, more or less a thing of the past. Knowledge today is vanishing behind new methods of transmission, and because of new methods of teaching and learning it is also increasingly subjectless. At the same time, it is regarded more and more as a product that is to be accommodated to the usual forms of the market. A society that once considered itself to be a society of knowledge has discovered that knowledge is a commodity, and indeed believes that it possesses a conception of knowledge that is superior to all those that went before. How did we arrive at this peculiar view of things? What happened? In the following I present six theses concerning Education and the Knowledge-society, Knowledge as a Good, Education through Science, and accompany these with a few explanatory remarks. I offer nothing fully finished, but perhaps something that is nonetheless stimulating (for a more detailed discussion see Mittelstrass 2001: 33-56). Thesis 1 Education that goes beyond the needs of the day, and beyond the vocational core, is more than ever necessary in a society that sees itself not only as open, but indeed as accelerating, in that it holds as a credo that there be unlimited mobility, innovation at any price, and chameleon-like flexibility. Without fundamental education, the open society will founder on its own adaptability. In the modern world, the pressure to change constantly and as a result to specialise our know-how is steadily increasing. This drive towards specialisation, however, stands in peculiar contrast to the simultaneous 'technological' integration of knowledge. This integration, which is effected by modern information and communications technologies, does not, however, lead to a new (or old) unity of the universally oriented, and thus universally orienting, knower, but rather to the creation of the expert. The modern world is a world of experts: it is ruled not by a Leibnizian understanding, namely one which mirrors the world, but by the specialist, in whom almost nothing, or to paraphrase Schiller, a divided world is reflected. The specialist, who knows ever more about ever less, has landed on the other side of universality: he seeks it in the detail that is for him a totality. But this can hardly do. In a world of experts, the old ideal of unified knowledge, even if the latter is still to be pursued 'technologically', loses its social function. The ordering of knowledge under the categories of universality and disciplinarity, that is to say the responsibility for both the whole and the part, begins to pale, and this is true most of all when the knowledge-society begins to understand itself as an information-society. That is why the present reincarnation of the knowledge-society as an information-society threatens us with disappointment, at least to the degree that these terms denote not merely an informed society, but indeed one which is oriented. How such an oriented knowledge can be achieved, and by this I mean one which is not to be confused with mere expert knowledge, is thus not a question that can be answered by appeal to yet more information. Put otherwise, the world of information in which we all live today, whether we like it or not, is not an oriented world, even if in rational cultures this oriented world must increasingly include elements of informational knowledge. …